AGING GRACELESSLY

I struggle with the fact I’m getting older. We all do, I know. A newborn at five days is older than it was at birth. Obviously. To be more precise, I’m at least at the trailhead of the path marked with the sign Growing Old. I cringe just typing that. I’m an anxious person and the thought of aging has always been an issue. Sure, I couldn’t wait until I reached sixteen. I can drive a car! (Actually, in Texas, you can get a “hardship” license that allows you to drive to work and school at fifteen. No open beer or unregistered gun though. Even the Lone Star State has a few limits.) Twenty-one was kinda cool, too. I could drink without my are-you-kidding-me fake ID. It’s not that I was a lush—getting drunk has never had any appeal, much less been a Friday night (AND Saturday night) goal; it’s just that I happened to be two years younger than my peers and didn’t want to have youth highlighted by the possibility of a server denying me my amaretto sour. Youth. If only.

 

I took hitting thirty hard. It was my premature midlife crisis, prompting me to walk away from my career as a lawyer (after a whopping two and a half years), and move from Los Angeles back to Canada, not to the area where I grew up, pre-Texas, but to Vancouver where I knew only one person.

 

After that, deep funks over getting older didn’t wait until I hit a new decade. Instead, every single birthday was cause for sorrow instead of celebration. Another year older…why the woo-hoo? As my mother is fond of saying, “Beats the alternative.” Sure. Technically so, but is that cause for cake? I’m not a cake fan even in general terms. I don’t tell people when my birthday is and I certainly don’t want parties or gifts. Let it pass. Don’t remind me. 

I don't want to board airplanes before everybody else.

 

Does it feel worse because I’m gay? I’ve long passed the threshold for being dead in gay years. I’m supposed to be settled down, out of sight, shopping for antique hutches with a partner, or I must submit to buying a one-way ticket for an aimless trip on an ice floe, waiting for a polar bear to scramble up after a swim and have breakfast. It would be easy to blame gay culture but, if anything, that’s only reinforced a mindset that was already there.

 

When I dated a guy last year, my running joke—which wasn’t funny at all—was that I was thirty-four, as if I’d undergone that cryonic frozen-in-time procedure without any of the problematic side effects like being in a block of ice. For a number of years now, I have truly felt like I was thirty-four in mind and body. Frozen in time, figuratively anyway. I’m more hyper than I’ve ever been, always rarin’ to go. My daily tasks are all punctuated with urgent exclamation marks. Jog! Bike! Write! Hike! Read! Work out! Thirty minutes after I finish a run, I’ll step outside, see someone else jogging and my mind automatically thinks, I should do another run. Now! I don’t but I really, really want to. 

 

I see the difference in my friends. My closest friend talks about his body turning pear-shaped (“like my [eighty-nine-year-old] father”) and spoke with pride this past weekend about how he likes to just sit and watch the morning show with Gayle King and her colleagues for three hours straight. While younger gay men send butt and dick pics to strangers, I send my friend pie pics (and, lately, croissant shots). He’s overjoyed. Another good friend has spent the past three years recovering from foot surgeries and considers an annual chat a significant investment. I hear lots about people’s aches and pains, frequent references to the way things used to be and all that talk about stocks, mortgages and pensions that made me cringe thinking about in my twenties, a sentiment that hasn’t changed. They aren’t willing to try oat milk, wonder out loud if they should get an e-bike (“It’d probably just sit in the garage”) and don’t believe meat-eating younger people would actually choose to eat at a vegan spot sometimes—just another option like Thai or Lebanese. 

 

What happened to fun? What about spontaneity? What happened to being open to new things, someday at least, if no longer with that sense of right away? It should be no surprise that the person I hang out the most with now is—you guessed it—thirty-four. This morning she sent me a TikTok video. I couldn’t figure out how to get it to play, but she filled me in after a couple follow-up texts. I’m (sorta) in the loop with the cool kids. On the weekend, I met her and her boyfriend to do a canopy walk in the forest. They drove there; I biked it. Afterwards, we sat on the grass and chatted. Friends my age look for benches. (“It’s too hard to get up,” one said recently.)

 

Ah, yes. Growing old takes some getting used to. My TV-watching friend talks about it with his own exclamation marks. Mushroom videos on YouTube! Pie! TV news! Horror movie marathons! I’m neither exaggerating nor making fun of him. I’m even partially in awe. He fully embraces the slower pace and, as he says, “doing nothing.” I was aghast this weekend on our “hike”—his term; I called it a walk—when he said, “What’s so great about our virtual world now is that I don’t have to travel anymore. I can just watch it all on my screen.” Sometimes you just know when not to argue a point. Sometimes people’s views are just too far apart. 

 

I do realize being sedentary isn’t solely for people growing older—there are plenty of twenty-something couch potatoes and nonstop gamers—but this friend of mind used to be on volleyball, softball and curling teams. He was my tennis bud. He backpacked across Europe and climbed Kilimanjaro. He’s three years younger than me but has a much older mindset. 

 

It used to be that my fear of growing old was about being alone. I didn’t want to be single and die alone. I’ve let most of that angst go. I still don’t want to die and go three weeks in my condo, body decomposing, only to be discovered because neighbors wondered about the bad smell in the hallway. Of course, I won’t be around to face them or be duly mortified, but it still seems more than a tad undignified for a final exit. I think I’ve solved this by deciding that, at some point, I’ll get my pastry pal to agree that we’ll text each other hello every morning. No text by noon requires investigation. Problem solved.

 

I’ve also worried aplenty about becoming invisible. I’ve observed many times how an elderly person walking with a cane has to stop at the edge of a sidewalk as a chatty couple or a group of younger folk (at that point, they’re all younger folk) pass by, oblivious to the gentleman’s need for space and constant concern about the possibility of falling and breaking a hip. I’m already getting a taste for being unnoticed and irrelevant. It’s one part freeing and two parts depressing. I’m learning to deal with it.

 

I may feel thirty-four, but that’s not what passersby see. I get called “sir” a lot and, while it’s supposed to convey respect, I hate it. The checkout person, the barista, the computer tech guy who has to show me how to download photos…to all of them I’m a sir. The only way I’ve “earned” the reference is in a “respect your elders” kind of way.

 

For all my denial about aging, the signs are surfacing. Six years ago, I got my first pair of glasses and now I can’t read anything without them. If I take a selfie, I’ll glance at it and think the crow’s feet and deep, saggy crevices under my eyes are an indicator of the low-quality camera on my cell phone. (I should get a newer version, but I can’t bear to hear all that gobbledygook about giga-somethings and some sort of cloud in the sky that stores my stuff. (What happens on a sunny day?) Even more telling, I can be as sour as those two old Muppets, Statler and Waldorf. Early onset of “cranky old man.”

 

Every time I forget something (What was that brilliant writing idea? Why did I open the fridge? Why am I holding this whisk?) I immediately attribute it to aging and fret that maybe I’m in the early stages of Alzheimer’s. Did I forget things when I was twenty-three? No, never. Of course not!

 

Worst of all, I’ve had to ease up a bit on my hiking for the last six weeks because my left knee has a persistent pain. Running is totally on hold. This is the beginning…

GOING STRONG

If you read my last post, you know I finally took some initiative and called on other gays and lesbians in my area to join me on a forest walk. While I am told that fifty people turned up for the annual potluck a few weeks ago, we had eight of us on the walk. Four of them dogs. (I had an extra one since my ex offloaded his newly acquired schnauzer for the weekend to allow him to take in the Outgames and Pride Parade. Not all of us sacrifice everything for our beloved canines.)

If there had been any thought of love in the cedars—and there hadn’t—it was snapped at the outset. No, I didn’t get the sense that any of them were coupled, but at 46, I represented the younger generation. The other three were longtime residents who knew each other by name, acquaintances at best. Sheila and Curt did a run-through of their latest health scares while Mitch, the eldest, focused on taming his two-year-old beast which in his words was “part Mastiff, part pony.” I kept my two dogs close, worrying about how my ex would take the news that his pooch became a Scooby Snack.

The conversation was stilted during the walk, but it didn’t matter. Dogs are like toddlers, constant fodder for trivial talk.

“Yes, he always seems to poop in the middle of the path.”

“Mine is so much better off-leash. Really.”

“Does he mean anything when he bares his teeth like that?”

Curt, the chattiest, was the only one without a dog. He interspersed the dog talk with tidbits about the healing powers of local berries and running commentary on hippie activities in the park before retirees and yuppy weekenders changed everything.

I tried my best to be sociable, but I spent much of the time observing and thinking. These three people represented me in twenty years—assuming I am still single and if I am lucky. Each was in good shape, each with plenty to keep them vibrant.

For Sheila, it was her Labradoodle whom she walked early each morning with a group of women in her neighborhood. She had some medical condition for which she’d recently sent out an email asking for donations to support a related fundraiser. This was her second walk of the morning, but she was the one who suggested we take a longer route than what I’d initially proposed.

By appearance, Curt seemed like a flashback, still dressed as he would have twenty years ago in a sleeveless tee, construction boots, jean shorts, a colorful hanky in the back pocket and a feather earring dangling from one ear. I’ll give him credit—the look suited him. Makeover candidate? Perhaps, but no urgency. When you are confident, you can carry off anything. Curt was heading for the ferry after our walk, set to take in a weekend of the Pride Parade, a Pride art exhibit, a play and a night at a club. “I might get a little bit naughty,” he whispered, a devilish smile suppressing any iota of self-doubt. Once back home, he’d be back to writing, painting and freezing berries for winter.

Mitch was the quietest. He represented my most likely flash forward. While Sheila and Curt had attended the potluck, Mitch stayed away intentionally. Curt, in fact, thought I might have the wrong name as we waited and I mentioned that Mitch had replied that he was coming. “Oh, Mitch doesn’t come to anything. He’s happy being antisocial.” Like me, Mitch is a vegetarian. While we didn’t exchange notes, I am sure the diet plays a factor in his passing on potlucks. During the walk, it came out that Mitch held the same career as I currently have. He, in fact, worked at the same site where I am in the Lower Mainland. That, of course, was thirty years ago.

Mitch was reserved in every way, a stark contrast to out-there Curt and the take-charge, abrupt Sheila. He answered questions cordially, but did not elaborate. He dressed conservatively, a polo shirt neatly tucked into pressed jeans. He followed up the walk with a thank-you email and a link to other local trails, something he’d referred to during our outing. Mitch was a man of his word.

Sometimes with my single gay friends, we’ve wondered what it will be like to grow old alone. We joked about it in our late twenties. The questions seem more sobering now. How will I know if I am going senile? Who will call 911 if I have a stroke? How long might it take before I am found?

Morbid? I suppose. But there have been some recent news accounts that make the implausible plausible. Perhaps a group of us can book a wing in a nursing home. Little rainbow banners can adorn the hallway, guiding us “home” should we lose our way.

Staying vibrant is essential. We should all have trailblazers ahead of us. To be sure, Mitch is not creating a path through slash and burn tactics. He strikes me as the type to hold his pruners through a pair of gloves, snipping away any errant weeds or blackberry offshoots. Yes, there is a clearing. Should I remain single, quiet contentment is possible.

I’ll post another invite for another walk at another park in the next couple of weeks. I’m not looking for a crowd of fifty. A human headcount of four is just fine. Or something like that. A little fresh air is always good.